Love That Confronts

There is a question most of us would rather not sit with for very long: what do you do when someone you love is living in a way that is hurting them — and they refuse to stop? It is one thing to know the right answer in the abstract. It is another thing entirely when the person in question is someone you care about, someone who sits near you on Sundays, someone whose name you would put on a prayer list without a second thought. First Corinthians 5 forces the question out into the open, and it does not let us off the hook easily. The church at Corinth had encountered exactly this situation — and their response, Paul makes clear, was exactly wrong.

The specific sin Paul addresses is almost beside the point for our purposes. What matters is the congregation’s reaction to it. A man in the church was openly, persistently living in a sexually immoral relationship — the kind of relationship that even the surrounding Roman culture condemned. And the Corinthians were proud of themselves for tolerating it. They had taken their silence and dressed it up in spiritual language. They were open-minded. They were gracious. They were not the kind of community that judged people. Paul cuts through every one of those justifications with a single word: arrogant. What they were calling tolerance, God called pride. And pride, Paul says, is not a neutral thing. It is a spiritual condition that blinds a community to what is actually happening in its midst.

What should they have done instead? Paul’s answer is striking in its emotional specificity: they should have mourned. The word he uses is the word for grieving the dead. This is not the mild discomfort of someone who disapproves of a choice. This is the deep, gut-level grief of a family that has lost someone. The Corinthians were celebrating their open-mindedness while a brother in their congregation was spiritually drifting away from everything that gives life. Paul expected them to feel that loss the way a parent feels the loss of a wandering child. Not with superiority. Not with condemnation. With grief. Because that is what love actually looks like when it is honest about what is at stake.

This brings us to what is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the passage: the call to church discipline. When Paul instructs the congregation to remove the unrepentant man from their fellowship, it sounds harsh to modern ears — and honestly, it should sound serious. But the purpose Paul gives for it is not punishment. It is restoration. He uses the language of a physician, not a judge. The goal of discipline, carried out under the authority of Christ and in the spirit of genuine love, is to so interrupt the comfortable path of ongoing sin that the person wakes up and finds their way back. Galatians 6 puts it this way: restore such a person with a gentle spirit. The word translated “restore” there is a medical term for setting a broken bone. Painful, yes. But the pain is in service of healing.

Paul deepens the urgency with an image every Jewish reader in his audience would have recognized immediately. A little leaven, he says, leavens the whole batch of dough. Before the Passover feast, Jewish families would search their homes from top to bottom for any trace of leaven and remove it entirely — not most of it, all of it. The reason is simple: leaven does not stay where you put it. It works outward, quietly and invisibly, until it has changed everything it touches. This is exactly what Paul says happens in a community that tolerates ongoing, unrepentant sin. It does not stay contained to the individual. It shifts what the congregation considers normal. It silences the voices that might have spoken. It communicates, without a single word being said, that certain things are acceptable here. And by the time anyone notices the change, the whole batch is different.

But Paul does not leave us with a warning about leaven. He leaves us with a declaration about a Lamb. Right in the middle of this difficult chapter — in between the confrontation and the correction — he plants this sentence like a stake in the ground: “For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed.” The entire Passover narrative of Exodus 12 was always pointing forward to this moment. The spotless lamb, the blood on the doorpost, the death angel passing over — all of it was a picture of what God would one day do through His own Son. The cross was not merely a transaction for forgiveness. It was a liberation. It brought those who were enslaved to sin out into the freedom of an entirely new life. And here is the logic Paul wants us to follow: if that is true — if the Lamb has already been sacrificed and the old life has been put away — then the call to holiness is not a burden added to the gospel. It is the only fitting response to it.

There is a phrase Paul uses near the end of the passage that has stayed with me all week. He calls the Christian life a feast. Not a courtroom. Not a performance review. A feast. And he invites us to keep it — with sincerity and truth, free of the old leaven of malice and wickedness, gathered around the One who made the whole celebration possible. This is what the church at its best actually looks like. Not a community that pretends everything is fine when it isn’t. Not a community that polices its members with a spirit of self-righteousness. But a community honest enough to grieve together, brave enough to tell the truth in love, and joyful enough to know that the table is already set and the seat already paid for.

This Sunday we are continuing our series Building on the Foundation as we walk through 1 Corinthians 5 together. Whether this passage makes you uncomfortable or brings unexpected relief, we hope you will come ready to sit with it honestly. The question Paul is asking is not really about a first-century congregation in ancient Greece. It is about us — about what it means to be a community that takes sin seriously because it takes grace seriously. We would love to have you with us Sunday at 10:45am at Union Avenue Baptist Church, 2181 Union Avenue. If you can’t be here in person, you can join us online at unionavenue.org. Come ready to keep the feast.

Union Avenue Baptist Church  ·  2181 Union Avenue  ·  Sundays 10:45am  ·  unionavenue.org